Mystery

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Exercises

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The mystery of Easter Island and the Moai statues that inhabit it is something that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, but the fact that there are still so many unanswered questions surrounding the island is in itself quite remarkable.

Back in Easter in 1722, a Dutch explorer happened upon something strange. He was originally in search of a land mass called Terra Australis. Instead though, he discovered an island in the Southeastern Pacific Ocean, which he would later name Easter Island due to the date of its discovery.

He was surprised to discover that the island was inhabited, and he reported seeing 2,000 to 3,000 people there. This was surprising, because the island is ... well … really far from anything else at all.

A staggering 1,900 kilometres away from the nearest inhabited land, and about 3,500 kilometres off the coast of Chile. And yet despite its incredible remoteness, The Rapa Nui people who called the island home managed to carve and transport a mind-blowing 887 statues, some measuring 33 feet tall and weighing up to 82 tonnes, an average of 17 kilometres each. And this all happened roughly 700 years ago. The biggest remaining question mark concerning the statues themselves is definitely their transportation.

Theories have been proposed that involve ropes, sleds, rollers, levelled tracks, or even that the people slowly rocked the statues back and forth to their destination. Attempts have been made to recreate the methods that could have been used, but most resulted in damage to the statues, or would have required hundreds of people making just 0.08 kilometres of progress per day.

The truth is, we don’t really know exactly how they did it. But however the Rapa Nui managed to move the Moai, they would have certainly needed to be incredibly patient, creative, and organised to make them a reality.

The Antikythera Mechanism is an incredibly complicated analogue computer found in a shipwreck near Greece in the year 1900. The device was used to determine the positions of stars using a mind-bogglingly complex series of bronze gears.

The device in and of itself would already be impressive, but the unbelievable part of the mechanism? It was created over 2000 years ago, and more than 1,000 years before anything even approaching its level of technological complexity and workmanship would be discovered again. The Antikythera mechanism was built over 1,600 years before Galileo was born, and over 1,700 years before Isaac Newton was born.

So if you were looking for a start-off point for your new time-travel novel or alien sci-fi epic, this one should be perfect. Because for all the explanations we can offer, the Antikythera Mechanism raises even more questions.

On a summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, recorded the strongest hard evidence of extraterrestrial life in human history. Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, hoping to come across a signal that bore the hallmarks of one sent by intelligent aliens.

And on that night, he saw his measurements spike, in a big way. The signal lasted for 72 seconds, the longest period of time it could possibly be measured by the machines that Ehman was using. It was unmistakable, and appeared to have originated from 120 light years away.

Ehman wrote the words “Wow!” on the original printout of the signal, thus its being known as the “Wow! Signal.”

In June 1947, multiple ships travelling trade routes in the strait of Malacca, off the coast of Malaysia, received a terrifying SOS message that read: “All officers including captain are dead lying in chart room and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.” After a short period of time, one final message was received, that read simply ... “I die.”

Nearby ships identified the source of the signal as coming from a Dutch ship, the SS Ourang Medan.

The nearest merchant ship, The Silver Star, travelled as fast as they could to the source of the distress signal. But upon boarding the Ourang Medan, they were horrified by what they found: Every member of the crew lay dead, their corpses scattered on the decks.

The eyes of the men were still open and expressions of sheer terror were frozen on their faces. The Silver Star’s party found the deceased radio operator as well, his hand still on the radio, and eyes wide open.

But strangely, there were no signs of wounds or injuries on any of the bodies. The Silver Star’s crew decided to tow the ship back to port, but before they could get underway, smoke began coming from the decks below.

The boarding party quickly returned to their ship and barely had time to escape before the SS Ourang Medan exploded and swiftly sank. To this day, the exact fate of the ship's crew remains a mystery.

• What is the universe made of? Astronomers don’t really know what 95 percent of the universe is made of. Atoms, which form everything we see around us, only account for 5 percent. Dark matter or dark energy?

• Life? Four billion years ago, something started stirring in the primordial soup. But how did the basic chemicals present on early Earth spontaneously arrange themselves into something resembling life? How did we get DNA? What did the first cells look like?

• What makes us human? Just looking at your DNA won’t tell you — the human genome is 99 percent identical to a chimpanzee’s and, for that matter, 50 percent to a banana’s.

• What’s so weird about prime numbers? The fact you can shop safely on the Internet is thanks to prime numbers — those digits that can only be divided by themselves and one. Public key encryption — the heartbeat of internet commerce — uses prime numbers to make keys capable of locking away your sensitive information. And yet, despite their fundamental importance to our everyday lives, the primes remain a mystery.

• What’s at the bottom of the ocean? Ninety-five percent of the ocean is unexplored. What’s down there? The discoveries we’ve made so far are a tiny fraction of the strange world hidden below the waves.

Writing

There are many types of mystery stories, such as the Classic Whodunnit or the supernatural mystery, write one of your own.

OR

Investigate a real world mystery like the ones above. Research it and report about it.

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